DVD of the Week: Ivan the Terrible

Sergei Eisenstein’s production of movies was sharply curtailed by Stalin’s regime, but during the Second World War, when the U.S.S.R. was under horrific siege, he made “Ivan the Terrible,” which I discuss in this clip. The film is a quasi-operatic tribute to the sixteenth-century Tsar Ivan IV, a modernizer and unifier of Russia: the founder of Russia’s standing Army, commander of major military victories, and ruthless opponent of the power of the landed aristocracy. As Ivan, Nikolai Cherkassov gives one of the most colossal performances in the history of cinema. He captures the character’s audacity and his world-historical vision—and, in the second part of the film (which Stalin banned), he also captures the besieged ruler’s increasingly unhinged, paranoid, violent response to his enemies.

Eisenstein’s silent films are famous for their use of editing—which he theorized, in teachings and writings, as “montage,” a principle of association that he considered constitutive of the cinema. But far from opposing the coming of sound, he looked forward enthusiastically to the use of sound in movies. He considered that its contrapuntal application to images would once again revolutionize the art, and he wrote that the soundtrack would give rise to a new, inner dimension to filmmaking, the internal monologue. In effect, he anticipated the first-person, modernist cinema, and even if, in making “Ivan the Terrible,” he didn’t have entirely free rein to put his theories to work, the soundtrack is as notable as the graphically potent, titanic images: he created a symphony of voices, blended with original music by Sergei Prokofiev, that conjures both the deliverance and the derangement of power. The director understood them well—he was at the receiving end of both.

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